Mana’s face was twisted in pain as she and Meiko traversed the streets of Otogakure, running quickly through the streets instead of using the roofs and the wires on the upper levels for transportation as ninja would’ve normally done. It would’ve taken Mana a minimal output of physical chakra to be able to traverse like she used to be able to once “ like a real ninja but combined with the intolerable pain from her wounds from the torture it would’ve been an agonizing trip. Even moving as fast as the two did, which was to say at a sluggish pace, Mana was twitching and trying to conceal just how bad her injuries were, or at least how badly they hurt.
It was really stupid to take Kouta’s ability for granted like that and treat her own health in this much disregard and disrespect. By now Mana had gotten used to the young man healing her whenever something like that happened so she forgot what moving around injured even felt like most of the time. Now when Kouta was somewhere else, probably too far away to be found and asked for help, Mana had a painful reminder of just how stupid the idea of taking all the torture was. She probably could’ve protected her body using chakra augmentation but then she’d have risked losing it all again…
After she managed to somehow regain the ability to use physical chakra and at least dabble in some of the things she used to be able to do, at least play being a weakling ninja instead of feeling absolutely useless, Mana dreaded losing it all again more than she feared her own death. Just a small taste of the identity she once had and lost made the magician addicted to it again, losing all of it would’ve been absolutely unacceptable. It would’ve sent Mana spiraling down the pit of darkness again, she’d have done stupid things and thought even dumber thoughts and the magician knew it.
“We’re moving really slow…” Mana whimpered in pain, clutching at her sides, Meiko asked to take a look but Mana pleasantly refused.
“It’s OK, we have no idea if those guys will even strike today, we’re just checking those areas and… There’s really no need for us to rush” Meiko smiled to Mana so genuinely that either the blacksmith was a really good actress or she really believed it.
“They will…” Mana closed her eyes as her feet refused to move and she sat down by a dumpster. “If that map you’ve shown me is right they’ve hit over eighty points already, now they’ve only got several more. They’ll be getting desperate, whatever they’re trying to achieve with this coordinated string of pointless violence they already have it in sight and that makes people desperate, it makes them rush and hopefully make mistakes” the magician explained her stance on things and stood back up starting to slowly pick up speed again.
“I… It’s probably gonna sound really rude but… You said you can’t feel anything while meditating and that’s how you probably withstood that torture for so long but so can’t you just do it now? Filter it all out?” Meiko asked of Mana, probably fully realizing that if Mana had any way of avoiding this pain she’d have done it. Normally the magician was never afraid of suffering or even placing her own life on the line but this time her pain was actively stopping them from reaching the goal and that was dangerous.
“I can’t. If I was sitting still I could but not while trying to move somewhere. I can’t both move and meditate” Mana replied coldly.
“I could carry you, then you’d just tune out and not feel any of it” Meiko suggested again with a voice that suggested pity for Mana’s pain.
“It’s fine. I’m not going to make you carry me around and even if I would I may slip out so hard that I won’t be able to snap out when we arrive. Last time I only woke up when my body was being dumped and everyone thought me dead, after losing my chakra my meditation mastery is a bit wobbly. I can’t do anything right…” Mana shook her head. All of this temptation of ways she could’ve avoided dealing with the pain she accepted so easily without fully comprehending the consequences made her jumpy and her rude tone may have revealed that to Meiko already.
The two finally arrived at where they previously pointed the next outbreak of violence to be. Just from the first look the magician realized that it has already happened “ they were too late. There was this chilling stench of blood and death in the air, the alleyway, not unlike where the little girl was murdered previously, was dead silent. Only someone’s final resting place let out signs like that.
Mana limped around clutching at her gut and sides, hoping that she didn’t open any of the bandaged little wounds that she had and examined the place. There was a creepy and serene dripping sound coming from a nearby dumpster so the magician called her friend and asked to have it opened. Meiko looked at Mana questioningly only for the girl to blush embarrassingly.
“I don’t want to get any garbage on me and risk infecting my wounds” Mana said. Her own weakness disgusted her but she’d rather have betrayed just how useless she was than risked getting infected over something that stupid. After the explanation Meiko appeared to have no problem with doing as she was asked to do, she opened the dumpster and pulled out a man placed inside. Both girls covered their noses before realizing that the man must’ve been dead for at least an hour.
Mana knelt by the poor soul and examined him. He reeked not only of death but also of garbage so it was tempting to throw up the horrible lunch she had that day every moment of examination. Still, Meiko probably lacked the sharp attention needed to pick up the right details and by now the blacksmith realized that with her getting the pulling the corpse out of the dumpster part she actually got the easy part.
This time there were signs of extreme resistance. Whatever happened here clearly indicated that the man wanted no part of this and didn’t just accept his cold blooded murder like the little girl before did. His palms and knees looked crushed, some of his joints were awkwardly twisted and snapped. The man’s face was also strangely bloated and had a nasty color. Mana had to ask Meiko to drag the corpse closer to a bar light nearby to properly examine the color aspects of the cadaver.
The worst part that there was no way of telling if the two were chasing ghosts or not “ this time the angle of the stab appeared to be inflicted from straight up but if the man was knocked down it could’ve easily still have been done by the same short person they’re looking for or a kid. It could’ve been just a random victim of street crime or a part of the string of murders. It could’ve been this ritual of death thing or just a random accident, one unlike those that happen every night in the alleyways of the large villages.
“So is it another one?” Meiko asked leaning up closer with her nose still pinched. A smell like that would’ve knocked out or at the very least forced to throw up any uninitiated and Mana was glad that she had a weaker nose than most her peers.
“Tough to say. If we were Police Force officers we’d have no solid proof attributing this to anything else but common street crime but…” Mana stood up before noticing another detail beside the man “ tracks of blood that mixed into the mud, made clearer when the man’s body began to bleed all over the mud and the difference between bloody mud and just the ordinary black dirt was clear as day.
“The Syndicate goons told us they’re really strict about maintaining public order unless its them disrupting it” Meiko finished Mana’s sentence somewhat questioningly, as if asking for a confirmation that it was what Mana meant to conclude at.
“Exactly…” the magician concluded slowly walking up the steps into a turn to a dead end alleyway. Slowly, step by step, the magician crept into the total darkness, opening her ears and eyes and hoping that her bodily instincts to crank her chakra augmentation up when in trouble was still functional after she regained her physical chakra use, at least in some limited capacity…
“Please don’t kill me!” a loud whimper of a cowering elderly man came out, the poor soul was hiding behind another pair of dumpsters placed side by side and in the pitch total darkness he was completely invisible. It made sense that if he slipped away here he’d have been totally lost by anyone tracking him if he didn’t betray his position like he just did forcing Mana to jump up in surprise.
Meiko ran right up to Mana, worried that the magician may have been attacked before noticing a man with a cracked head slowly bleeding over the dumpsters and the mud he was sitting on in a dark alleyway but too afraid to leave. Maybe that same fear saved his own life tonight…
“We’re not here to hurt you, we’re here to stop whatever’s happening, did you see what happened here? Did you see what killed that man?” Mana asked a couple of time wondering if she came out a little bit too persistent and demanding. She had no chance but to be that, there was no time for the man to shower and warm up, they needed to move on to the other remaining hotspots or else, at the very least, two more people would get murdered tonight or tomorrow night.
“It’s… They were a bunch of kids but they were so… Weird…” the man covered his face up, his tone suggested that he was weeping. It looked like the man didn’t want to appear cowardly and the magician knew how much male ego meant so she stood patiently until the man could continue. “They assaulted that man and tried stabbing him but he overpowered them. I was just pissing right here, I was drinking at the bar tonight, you see. The kids then attacked the man, clawed and bit at him, brought him to the ground and used rocks to break his joints and his hands and feet. They bashed him around before finishing the job. One of them tossed the rock right into my head as they were laughing and passing by me, the buggers could’ve murdered me too but they just ran by…”
Mana scratched her chin trying to make sense of things. “It’s alright, sir, it’s safe for you to go home now. Could you please just tell us how were those kids weird to you exactly?” she asked.
“I don’t know, their eyes had that strange glow in them, they were shining brightly with some sort of black symbols, like hieroglyphs on them for irises and they kept babbling about some “ritual” or “summoning” someone…” the man kept on whimpering, Meiko asked for more details making him aggressively jump up and begin rushing away from them.
“Look, I was drunk and I don’t know anything. Whatever’s happening here, those kids are gonna get it. You don’t just kill people like that in the Syndicate’s village. That’s all the comfort I need… You kids better not wonder in no alleyways and wait until someone finds the bodies of those brats with Syndicate’s signature all over them in a dumpster just like that poor guy. I fucking knew him… He was a regular at the bar… We even went out to pee at almost the same time” the man continued to talk to himself as he disappeared outside the alleyway exit and into the larger main streets.
Mana rubbed her exploding head and grunted angrily before asking that Meiko crossed off the area from the map. So whatever these kids were doing was not sensual, it was some sort of a stupid ritual so it obeyed no common sense or logic. Rituals never did. What kind of nonsense were they trying to pull off? With all of her history knowledge the magician knew of no similar strings of murders, if anything she could’ve sworn this was a more serial killer thing than a religious or ritualistic string of murders.
“We need to go, we’ve got two more spots left so let’s hurry up. If they are really a bunch of kids we can go to the next spot and then if they’re not there even to the last one faster than they could. I mean kids have short legs, don’t they?” Meiko tried to lighten up Mana’s mood when she saw the magician being stumped and even rubbing her forehead against the wall hard enough to tear away the bandages off her forehead.
“No…” Mana replied stopping Meiko in her tracks.
“Wait, what? Come on, Mana, don’t give up yet, we can still stop this magic whatever it is…” Meiko kneeled by Mana’s side gently pressing on her shoulder and pulling the magician’s head off of the wet and cold brick wall she was pressing it by.
“It’s not magic… I’m a stage magician, Meiko, I of all people know there’s no such thing as magic. They’re just murdering people out of delusion. They’re kids. They’re probably just religious kids or just kids that heard a pretty fairytale so there’s no way predicting what they’re thinking. I thought I was smart, I thought I could figure this all out but ultimately there’s just one thing to do now…” Mana mumbled under own nose.
“So which point do you think they’ll pick? It makes sense they’d pick the point one, right? It’s closer and the other one’s on the whole other side of the village… Wait, you said they make no logical sense so then we go to the other one, not the obvious one, right?” Meiko began flipping the man over and over again trying to make sense of anything when she had not yet realized just how insane the situation was. It would’ve taken a person of equal of greater insanity to figure out just which point those kids would’ve picked.
“We’ll split up. That’s the only way, you take the further point because you can get there in just mere seconds without me slowing you down, then you examine every corner of that area and if you find nothing you return to the point I am checking” Mana explained after getting off her knees and standing up.
“Wait… No!” Meiko shouted out. “You’re wounded, what if you get attacked, you’re moving to the closer point, there’s a bigger chance of you getting attacked” she argued but Mana shook her head.
“That’s the only way, there’s no way to be sure where they’d go and there’s just one way to make sure that no one else dies today. They have no chance in hell of killing you and I will make sure that they kill no one else, even if I have to die in the process. No one else dies, not to this senseless babble” Mana angrily explained before beginning to firmly walk towards the point she was supposed to cover, the one closer to where the latest murder was. Meiko looked at her with sad eyes and then departed to her faraway location so fast that she completely disappeared from the magician’s vision.
Nothing about this made any sense. The murders were committed for no reason but mindless ritualistic violence. That was why nothing about those murders made much logical sense, that was why the little girl wanted to get murdered “ they found no quick kills there and just killed one of their delusional own. They just wanted to kill people at every point, disguising that madness in some stupid babble about summoning something, in some stupid ritualistic magic thing. Mana, as a stage magician, was really angered by such a treatment of the beautiful childish illusion of magic. Magic was supposed to be an art of mystery and illusion, something so mysterious but natural that it appeared to be impossible to be explained by common means so it was just dismissed as magic. It was never supposed to be the means of disguising insanity and pointless murder.
Whether it was some strange religion, like that string of Jashinist murders a decade ago or some sickness that plagued those kids, they had to be stopped. It hurt to move, at Mana’s current shape she’d have a bit of trouble even keeping up with kids. If they were crazy and aggressive enough to beat down a grown well-built man she may just have her hands full but it didn’t matter. Even if she had to prove it to these kids that their silly rituals were nonsense by dying herself and sparing someone of the same fate, she’d stop them and their silly ritual.
*****
A couple of minutes later Meiko arrived at a small industrial district corner, it was not an alleyway where the point was placed on the map. It was right in the middle of a small neighborhood, surrounded by block of flats right in the middle of the street. The blacksmith looked around and began scanning each and every nook and cranny for clues but nothing could’ve been found, the girl began getting nervous as she was wasting precious time that her immense speed granted her by allowing to get there so quickly. The blacksmith swiftly jumped up and raised her arm up to block an attempt to slit her throat from behind, Meiko was perceptive, she was a ninja after all and it would’ve taken an actual ghost to sneak up on her. Her armored gauntlet had not a single scratch left from the pathetic kitchen knife used in the attempt to claim her life.
The blacksmith grabbed the little childish arm trying to pull the brat’s frame up her body and flipped it before kicking it so hard into the back that it hit a steel dumpster flying away, hard enough for the container to bend of the force at which the child slammed into it. Despite the fact that she was attacked the blacksmith was happy, happy that Mana would not have to deal with these kids in her current state. It was only then that it dawned to the redhead that if she murdered someone it would probably count towards the goal of these kids and they’d simply scatter in the alleyways, sewers and streets making it near impossible for Meiko “ a foreigner to this village to track them all at once. It’d have been better if the blacksmith played along with the rules of this ritual for now.
The blacksmith turned around only to see a bunch of kids with rocks in their hands, launching all of them aiming at Meiko. The blacksmith didn’t have to even react. Mere rocks had no chance of scathing her, it’d have taken inconsequential amount of chakra augmentation to withstand such a blow but Meiko lazily grabbed each and every chunk of rock tossed at her before letting them slip and tumble down on the pavement.
“I wonder if I should knock those kids out or what… It’s not like this place has a working Police Force establishment to place them in and giving them to the Syndicate just feels… Wrong” Meiko thought to herself as the kids attacked her from multiple locations each wielding a small shard of glass or a knife. Carefully and holding back every sense of her being the blacksmith lightly and effortlessly flashed behind each of the kids and tapped them at the backs of their necks knocking each of them out and then looking around for more kids that may have slipped and ran away.
If at least one of these little bastards killed themselves or each other Meiko’s entire effort would’ve gone to waste so the blacksmith sighed easier to herself and even clapped her hands together playfully. Then she heard a dreaded sound of steel clicking against a larger tube of steel “ a loading sound of a kunai dispenser. Terrified Meiko turned around only to witness a barrage of endless kunai fire.
“Let the little fuckers have it!” the Syndicate goon commanded his crew as the bunch unloaded the whole supply of their firing blades at the unconscious kids with Meiko as their only protector “ the mobsters must’ve also figured out who was behind the tumbling of their sensitive card house of order maintained through fear. The blacksmith’s arms moved quickly as she blocked each and every blow of thirteen lined up mobsters firing barrages of endless kunai strings from the dispensers. Meiko’s armored gauntlets deflected so many blades fired so strong that they bounced off into the darkness besides the blacksmith, the endless clanging of her blurry movements deflecting the endless blade fire in pitch black darkness almost deafened Meiko’s ears. In the end not a single hair fell from any kid’s forehead.
Meiko dashed forward hitting one of the goons from her elbow right in the gut. An upwards strike from her arm punched another mobster in the air with a hook that launched him a great distance up. Her foot moved and pushed the dispenser right into the face of the third as her headbutt took out the fourth crushing the man’s nose and the whole face. All faster than any of the mobsters could even register. More blows to the mobsters’ heads and guts, all of them incapacitating shots that would’ve killed any lesser man but Meiko knew that these men were no slouches, she had fought those Syndicate goons before and knew they had the appropriate skill of a fresh genin ninja. Within a couple of seconds the entirety of Syndicate’s goon squad was sent down on the stone paved street cold and unconscious.
Meiko turned around only to see the heart stopping sight of a kid choking on bursts of blood, some of it escaped his mouth and splashed onto the street. It took the redhead a while before she realized that the kid had bitten their tongue off and was now bleeding out. Slowly but surely. Within mere moments the kid died with a smile on its scary twisted face, it was unclear when exactly the kid had done it but there was little Meiko could’ve done for them with her limited supplies and medical skill. The rest of the crew who were still able to stand dashed for the possible exists, all the nooks and crannies, open manholes, alleyways and street exits, giggling and scattering faster than a caravan of a hundred horses. She had no idea how the select group of the kids recovered so lightning fast from being knocked out. It was almost like their bodies were not even governed by their own brains. The eyes of these kids glew so bright that they were like little candles with just a small hieroglyph which Meiko could not understand covering the glowing whites of the children’s eyes. These were no normal kids, these were little demons wandering the streets out for blood and they were aggressive and thirsty for blood, desperate to complete their infernal ritual.
Meiko scratched her eyes realizing what just happened.
“Mana will probably want to know…” she thought to herself. There was no hope for her to capture each and every child, they disappeared in the darkest alleyways, the most confusing and narrowest of the street turns and even inside open manholes and into the sewers. Maybe Meiko could’ve caught some of them but her crushed self-esteem was preventing even that achievement from being realized.
She failed… It went bad so fast and then she managed to do so good but then… It all failed. Meiko pounded the stone floor causing it to rupture as the blacksmith could barely contain her own chakra output in anger and frustration. She failed her friend and now Mana was in danger… Meiko would better move. A loud roar emanated from Meiko’s stomach signaling the blacksmith that she hadn’t eaten anything for a while but as much chakra as she spent on protecting those kids from all that firepower, as much of it was spent even getting to this desolate neighborhood… It won’t matter. Meiko looked onwards with determination and began heading towards Mana’s direction, it should only take mere minutes to move to the other side of the village in Meiko’s current worn out and hungry state but it would have to do… It will have to do. Meiko would not fail her friend again!
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